Congress leaves for Christmas without making women safer

Who could possibly hold up a bill guaranteed to get a bunch of rapistsoff the street for the cost of zero dollars? If your guess was the112th Congress, you won — but America’s women didn’t.

There wasn’t even a partisan split on this one; when you’ve got NewYork Democrat Carolyn Maloney and the conservative Concerned Womenfor America not only marching in the same direction but hoppingaround sending up alarm flares together, it’s fair to say you’ve gotyourself a consensus.

Apparently, yes. The SAFER Act of 2012 was supposed to force the federalgovernment to spend $117 million in already authorized funds toprocess some of the 400,000 rape kits sitting around collecting dustin evidence rooms around the country.

The money is being spent now, but on other things, and this bill would requireofficials to use at least 75 percent of it for its intended purpose.(“Slush fund” is such an unhappy phrase, but Congress found two yearsago that some of the money had been spent on conferences and processing DNA for other crimes.)

This would have been a perfect way for the GOP-controlled Congress to end a year in which not one but two Republican Senate candidates made offensive comments about rape.

Especially since while that DNA evidence remains untouched, predators can have themselves a jolly old holiday doing what they do; as Maloney, who wrotethe original 2004 bill that was supposed to end the kit-testingbacklog, says, “Rapists are very sick people; they keep going untilthey’re caught.”

The Senate version, sponsored by John Cornyn (R-Tex.) and MichaelBennet (D-Colo.), still needs the blessing of both Patrick Leahy(D-Vt.), who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Chuck Grassley(R-Iowa), the ranking Republican on the committee. Both havepreviously voted in favor of an even tougher version of the bill.Grassley just wanted to make sure that “Congress isn’t forcing lawenforcement to unnecessarily review kits,” an aide said, in cases where there’s plenty of other evidence, for example.

The House legislation was proposed by Ted Poe (R-Tex.), who as a judgeback home in Houston heard more than 25,000 felony cases in his 22years on the bench. As a former prosecutor, too, he knows fromexperience that this particular brand of offender does “everything theycan to harm women emotionally, to steal their souls — and knowing whodid it is very important to healing.”

So why didn’t his bill zip through Congress, as an early Christmaspresent to survivors? “I can’t answer why it’s not moving,” he told me on Thursday.“I’ve been talking to the Judiciary Committee and they just keep — theanswer is, ‘We’re working on it.’ ’’

Or they were. If the bill isn’t passed before the current Congress adjourns — now highly unlikely, since the House knocked off for Christmas Thursday night and probably won’t be back this year — legislators will have to start over from scratch in January.

As the clock wound down, the legislation was stuck in the House JudiciaryCommittee, waiting for the sign-off of Poe’s fellow Texan and fellowRepublican Lamar Smith, who chairs the committee, to putit on the calendar.

Penny Nance, who heads Concerned Women for America, is one of severalmajor proponents of the bill who suggested that Smith’s committee staffwas letting minor concerns effectively kill a bill that could savelives by preventing attacks: “I know there is a lot ofwell-intentioned staff, but they’ve got to get their big-boy pants onand get this done.”

House Judiciary Committee aides argued that they were already workinguntil midnight every night trying to rush 20 bills into law before thesession ended.

The nut of the problem, though, centered on a provision in the law thatwould create a national registry that, as originally envisioned, wouldhave allowed anyone to see the backlog in his or her area with just afew mouse clicks.

“We think we don’t publicly post that kind of information on a Website,’’ a House Judiciary aide said. “It could show that such-and-suchlaw enforcement agency has X rape kits untested in their evidencelocker, but it doesn’t paint the whole picture of why they weren’ttested” and might give an unfairly negative impression.

Not nearly as negative, though, as the impression that preventing moreattacks is just one more thing Congress couldn’t manage to act on — evenat no cost at all. And in theory, at least, with everybody on board.

Melinda Henneberger is a Post political writer and anchors She the People. Follow her on Twitter at @MelindaDC.

Melinda Henneberger is a visiting fellow at Catholic University of America’s Institute for Policy Research & Catholic Studies.